By highlighting this the Pope suggests in a subtle manner that this shared civility may just have something to do with a common intellectual heritage - the synthesis of Christian and hellenic thought which is found in the intellectual patrimony of Europe.

Thus in hellenic plastic art has been discovered the calm and serene intuition of life of those peoples, who feel, nevertheless, so poignantly, the universality of sorrow; thus has recently been discerned on the faces of the Byzantine saints "the terror of the millennium," a terror which is an equivoke, or an artificial legend invented by modern scholars.

Certainly, there was no trace here of sombre German gothicism and all that old - fashioned stuff; under the hands of my friend, the piece ran along the keyboard with a degree of "Greek serenity" that left me at a loss whither to turn; in my innocence I deemed myself transported to a neo-hellenic synagogue, from the musical cultus of which all old testamentary accentuations had been most elegantly eliminated.